According to Contently, 41% of inbound marketers struggle when it comes to content creation. One of the biggest reasons for this is because they don’t know what to write about. No matter what your niche, blog or industry may be, there are content topics that will make a lasting impact on your readers and customers. These ideas will give you a bleeding edge over your competition and leave your competitors astonished and keep them in complete wonder on what content marketing hacks are you using to attract visitors and customers on your blog.
This task of content creation will not only attract visitors or customers, it can also make your site an authority site as your visitors who seeks for new creations ends on your website. Conversely, when the content on your blog is highly useful, you’ll enjoy all kinds of benefits – accolades, links, traffic, proposals, brand improvement, and an increased conversion rate. You’ll have the total chances to become an authoritative voice (or influencer) in your industry / niche.
So if you’re ready to build a successful blog right from the very moment and make a living writing about what you’re passionate about and get recognised as an influencer in your niche and make income online then, here are 16 strategies and ideas you can steal ideas for your next blog post.
You can use this worksheet to come up with loads of ideas for your next blog post..
Strategy #1: Let Go
Most people, bloggers and businessman thinks that saying yes to everything but instead you should try to say No to Everything. And when you say No to EveryThing, you should only and only focus on the 1 Thing. While you grow or you do business every day you will get new ideas and you will try to implement it on your life. You business meetings..and you say yes, you keep saying yes to webinars, seminars, party’s, the new business ideas that strike you when you are in bathroom and so..And in this rat race you miss your one Thing.
This happened to me when I was looking to start my UniPixen Studios and the Social WordPress Plugin, and I focused on everything that came in my way. And in this process my 1 Thing (UniPixen Studios) never started and since then I have implemented this formula of Let Go and the One Thing.
As Steve Jobs said – People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on.But that’s not what it means at all. It mean saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.
Moreover Derek Halpern made a wonderful video on – saying No
Strategy #2: Understanding Blog Writing
When it comes to create a Blog and turn yourself into authoritative voice or make passive income online, the first thing that strikes anybody’s brain is to go with Blogging. And by blogging, they mean is to ctrl + c & ctrl + v or just go on writing without analysing that it is the content that attracts the visitors and turn you into an authoritative voice.
If content marketing is done in a good and positive way to your well researched and properly formatted blog post, then its no doubt that it can do wonders for your online business. I poured my time and energy into making sure that my readers always take something valuable away from my blog posts.
Random writing and jumping to various topics will not grow your blog. You need a solid build and a good focused content strategy to make your efforts rock .
Blogging isn’t supposed to be full of hype or a totally automated money/influence making software. This is one of the reasons why most internet marketers & Bloggers who create post using scammy push-button software never succeed at blogging. As they think their content is unique for search engines and they wont get penalised, but in this process they completely ignore for whom they are writing the post.
Turning yourself into a successful blogger is not a Child’s play but on the other hand it also not for superman. It’s for people like us, Ordinary people who were dedicated enough in their 1 Thing that turned them into a successful bloggers and in the process they also learned how blogging works. This are the people who recognised their 1 Thing: Guy Kawasaki, Chris Brogan, Seth Godin, Darren Rowse, Marie Forleo, Danny Iny and so on become influential & successful bloggers.
Know your 1 Thing to Run a Successful Blog with SmartActiveBlogger
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Strategy #3: Be Totally Transparent.
New internet marketeers lure traffic and visitors on their blog using baits like free giveaway, ebook download, limited offer and many. And while they may think that they are gaining traffic and visitors, they may but for a very short time. Visitors are not foolish or idiots, they know what you are trying to give and what you are trying to Get.
From a research it has been cleared that visitors love to come back and keep visiting your site if you share your insights and is transparent to your loyal readers and supporters. As Neil Patel Shares his deep insights of analytics and help his readers understand how analytics and conversion works.
As in my Blog, I’m transparent on my Google analytics data, the plugins and methods i use for my blog. I regularly share the insights of what works and what not in Blogging, and done a hell lot of testing on Content Marketing, SEO and WordPress.
You may have come across that many bloggers share their income reports and financial data to their subscribers and readers, they do this to create a relationship and influence their readers, Since returning visitors are much worth as they are the real supporters of your blog
Strategy #4: Focus on Just One Thing, and Do It Really Really Well.
Going Diverse is really good since you can target several variants of readers but it also has a done side, since you wont turn into a authoritative site and wont be able to influence your readers, as your readers wont find any consistent content since you topic is so vast and variant.
Have a look at Neil Patel’s blog Quick Sprout focuses deeply on how to increase your business profits ,make more money, and increase conversion rate and he provides a lot of hard information and unique resources to back up it up as he does a lot of research and his team really takes that effort to make the hard work fruitful.
Another great focused blog is Backlinko by Brian Dean, and he exclusively focuses on building backlinks and helps to generate traffic and social shares. His posts/articles are lengthy but still is on topic and each lines provides valuable content.
Also by the same, Darren Rowse from ProBlogger offers more than 700 articles on one basic topic i.e improving your blogging skills and he offers video tutorials too on some of his guides. When you focus on just one thing, it’s easier to rise to the top and get noticed as the authority in your niche and turn into a influencer blogger.
Strategy #5: Create a Little Attention Box. Seriously.
As in todays generation, the blog contents are getting really lengthier, and the attention time-span is getting shorter & shorter. According to HubSpot, 55% of your Visitors leave your website within the first 15 seconds. This data shows that people aren’t reading content on the web the way we think they are, and the whole measurement system might be broken.
As your blog will get less than 15 seconds of attention period, you must have a little attention box on your post to make it a call to action for your visitors as almost half of them would abandoned your site within 15 seconds.
Below is a demonstration of ” the little Attention” box
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This ‘ the little attention” box is used by Neil Patel on his blog, Brian Dean on Backlinko & this attention box is really great and useful when it comes to grab the attention within few seconds. If you want to create your own ” the little attention” box, here is a little tutorial on it.
Successful Influencers like Ramit Sethi, Neil Patel, Brian Dean, Pat Flynn, Derek Halpern, Ramsay all make use of this little attention box as they know about the attention span their visitors have and they make use of that attention span to get them back again to their blog and turn them into loyal customers.
Strategy #6: The Over Night Magic
Until you are some kind of wizard or have a zero day hack or may be very lucky you may have the Over Night Magic, but for normal people like us the over night magic is just a movie scene. Till today i know that there is nothing like the over night magic and with the people i have met and knew so far, even they don’t believe in the over night magic.
Nothing happens overnight, as like behind every successful man there is a woman, so is behind every influential person there is a dedicated hard work.
Hard work is key to success, is just half truth. Focused hard work is the real key to success. Stick to the one thing and let go the others is definitely reap you the fruits.You’ll find several examples of blog posts where the author shared their experiences of their success.
Remember to have your pen and paper with you so you can jot down ideas during a keynote session. You don’t want to miss out on any thoughts or ideas as they occur to you. Write them down because those could form the basis of your blogging career – you never can tell.
Strategy #7: Building Relationship
According to SmartPassiveIncome, the biggest mistakes that blogger makes when they try to grow is they focus entirely on creating new post rather connection to the poeple of their niches and relevant niches.
You should forget about your metrics like page views, bounce rates, sessions and search visitors.
Those things don’t matter if those users are not joining/opting-in your email list, buying your products, or sharing your content on social networks. Those are actionable metrics that you have to measure consistently and over time.
There is a vast difference between actionable metrics and relationship. While the metrics may intend/show you that your blog is growing, which may be or not. Building relationships is definitely help you to grow and the vast truth is they support you in your new journey like testing a product or a new strategy.
Strategy #8: Understanding the Article itself
Article and its title is vital when you want your post to rock on the internet. What bloggers do is just write about what they know about that topic and hit the publish button. They never format the posts they way the post makes it most of conversion to your readers. If you have noticed my post and the format I use is that I make a lot of use of “I” and “You” in my post, this words make my readers feel that i am targeting them this post and this post is definitely for them.
Also if you notice that my post are formatted in a simple way..H2 are used for heading and paragraphs are simple <p> .
If you want to learn about converting your readers, then you should put yourself on how to conduct A/B split testing starting from the scratch, authority sites such as Conversion Scientist, and Optimizely will come in handy.
Strategy #9: Choose The One Thing – And Then Be Diverse.
I have seen many users who start blogging and tries to post on every topic they could find and they end on with it making nothing at the end, since they blog on each topic they no longer remain an expert on a specified topic. Focus on Just One Thing, and Do It Really Really Well and then move on to the next big thing.
As like Neil Patel’s blog Quick Sprout focuses exclusively on how to increase business profits and help you to understand how web analytics and their data works. Brian Dean is an expert and a great blogger when it comes to create backlinks for your blog & websites. Darren Rowse offers numerous blog posts on improving your blogging skills and he focuses only on that.
When you focus on just one thing, it’s easier to rise to the top and get noticed as the authority in your niche rather than to be another dictionary in no one niche.
For example, if you are deep;y interested on wordpress and have a deep passion on it, then you should definitely go on to blogging on wordpress and that’s your one thing.
Obviously you don’t want to write about cricket,football, the stock market, investing, automobiles and how to take care of babies or money and flower gardens all in one blog.
Strategy #10: Get Ideas From Competitors
Why not to spy on your competitors and try to avoid the mistakes they made and adapt the best moves they got? Sometimes its a hell lot easier to peek over someone shoulders who is ahead of you in the game.
Definitely you should compete with your competitors but not making them your foe, instead making them your good friends, in this way you make the competition and its energy positive. This is how I grew my blog and was able to make 150% increase in traffic and significantly reduce my exits and bounce rate.
Here is how my performance was
Be a smart content marketer and should stop perceiving other blogs and bloggers as your competition. Even though they may be up against you, you should befriend them instead. Hatred never pays, so you should definitely be friendly and steal ideas that may rock your blog.
Strategy #11: Think Outside of The Box
Think outside the box doesn’t means you to think all the way crazy and start doing it, as its outside the box. Yes crazy ideas may sometime hit you a luck but in most cases it not worthy. Thinking outside the box in your blog is a great way to increase your traffic, conversion and many things of your desired area.
Here are a few examples that you can make to blog stand out of the crowd.
Make Effective Headlines
Use Short, Snappy, Informative Video.
Content Format
Use of Infographics
Hacking Blog Design
The Little Attention Box
Turn Your Blog Into a Mission
Use Your Personality
Keep implementing changes in your blog. In my blog I keep making new changes and in the recent times, i found that implementing a simple and normal font makes visitors stay longer on my website & taking away that hell of sharing buttons and keeping it simple with just two social networks made it much simpler for my readers to share my post on social networks as they have only few options to make their selection.
Strategy #12: Subscribe to email lists of your Niche Experts
To compete with your competitors and making your move with them in order to get ahead of them, you can subscribe to their email list so you always have the shoulder peak. Do this in the best way you can, subscribing to your competitors email list makes you able to see how them email their subscribers, the format of their content and they way the write their post, the words they use to influence and the tool they use if they share.
To come this far I have subscribed to Neil Patel’s so that i can truly make use of my google analytics data and learn from his experience and knowledge. I made my subscribe list almost full by subscribing to every important topics that i need to know or learn to get started with my journey. Like. Subscribing to Moz helped me to understand the SEO and how it works.
Strategy #13: Do Case Studies
Yaro Starak from entrepreneur journey does a lot of case study and post it on his blog. He calls himself as Living a laptop style life
Muhammad Noer: How This Indonesian Entrepreneur Attracted 20,000 Subscribers and 1,000 Paying Members To His “How to Speed Read” Business
Morgan Brown: How to Start a Blog About Home Loans as a Side Project, Turn It Into a $4,000 a month Income Stream, All While Still Working a Job
Jaime Tardy: From $70K In Debt to a Six-Figure Coaching Business, Podcast, Book and Masterminding with Millionaires
And those are just the most recent 3.
Strategy #14: Use of Social Networks & Tools
I’m sure that by now, you have started thinking of optimising your post for social medias. As you can see above Blogs and news websites have a huge traffic coming from facebook.
According to statistics, Facebook, is the #1 source of social media traffic. So if you don’t have enough ideas or datas to generate your blog post ideas you can outsource it or scrap it from social medias and reading others blogs
Many people say it hard to come up with ideas, but I personally say its wrong. This means that you should never worry about what to write. Infact i have more post waiting in my draft to be completed than i ever had published as i keep getting ideas on new topics and what to write next.
Why do you ever need to struggle to find great ideas for your blog, when industry and influencer blogs have everything you need?
Strategy #15: Analytics Expert.
What most bloggers and business man does is that they just have a look at their graphs in their analytics dashboard and presumes everything from that graph. They never make their way to the bottom of their graph where the real data is.
I have increased by conversion rate by 550% and my traffic by 200% just analysing my google analytics. Worked on reducing the bounce rate and eliminating the possible reasons why they abandoned the site.
So make sure you’ve set a specified time frame to gauge your results. If you’re writing case studies and they don’t increase your search, social, and direct traffic after a time, go back to the drawing board.
Every marketing activity that you engage in should improve your conversion rate, either directly or indirectly. It may not happen overnight, which is why you must monitor your Google Analytics dashboard over a period of time.
Conclusion
As you can see, it’s really not too difficult to generate ideas for your blog posts. If you can implement just one of the strategies mentioned in this in-depth post, you can find more than a year’s worth of ideas to keep your readers engaged.
As long as your audience is engaged, you’ll get more social shares and comments and a higher engagement rate.
If you have any queries, hit a comment below or email me, I reply to each and every comments and emails.
This post 15 ideas You Can Steal from Successful Blogs For Your Next Blog Post is from The Smart Active Blogger. oh! SAB.